


Too Much

by MontagueBitch (porcia_catonis)



Category: Classical Greece and Rome History & Literature RPF, Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
Genre: Admiration, First Meetings, Gen, Introspection, Understated Chemistry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 15:51:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10834431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/porcia_catonis/pseuds/MontagueBitch
Summary: Porcia meets her husbands friends for the first time.  Out of all of the, it is the Epicurean who catches her eye the most.  She is too hungry and lean, in her way, too.





	Too Much

**Author's Note:**

> Another first sight rp prompt that I had a lot of fun with. I'm normally Cassportus trash, but I went with something more understated here.

Porcia has been mostly quiet until now, not out of any lack of thought, or any fear of speaking. She speaks when prompted, and she answers questions with confidence, but she keeps her own under lock and key.

Instead, her eyes have been on everyone, drinking them in; remember their names, their characters, how they react. Marcus’s friends, she finds, are people she feels more at home among than others who’ve shared his company. She does not see Rome’s charismatic dictator at the table tonight.

One, in particular, draws eyes to them, alone in a swatch of light, while the rest faded; whatever illuminates him has skipped the others, or outshines so clearly that he may as well. Gaius Cassius Longinus, despite all odds–they say he’s an Epicurean of all things, and what place has an Epicurean in serious matters?–the man, though a stranger til now, carries something intrinsically familiar. 

He speaks too loudly, he is too inquisitive, too staunch, too unmoving, too extreme, too severe, too intense–he is too much, and the stroke of realization echoes through her ribcage, rattles her spine, until it sticks at her center. She loves Marcus with all her heart, but she will never fathom how he can stretch himself thin to garner peace, when she would sooner lost a full night of sleep and cut ties to win.

It is when a few men have left already, though Cassius has not yet decided to take himself home to rest that she speaks. 

“I wanted to tell you, Cassius,” she says, leaning forward in her chair, eyes fixed on him, “that I, for one, think you’re right. Power given to one at the exclusion of everyone else is either arbitrary, or stolen. Either way, by ignorance or by ambition, it has to be… dispersed again.” She says, with a smile.

“You are not alone in finding yourself increasingly angry of late.” Porcia may not have as consistent a platform to speak on, but she has ears and eyes, and a mind as much as any man invited tonight. 

“I appreciate someone who sees beneath the skin.” She knows she treads shaky ground; every time she speaks, she courts being seen as a puppet of her late father, or holding onto a grudge on his behalf. She has felt for herself how little thoughts of their own men afford women in their minds.

So be it, she decides. Her husband knows her mind, and has never been anything but her partner and ally. His friends, if they are hers as well, will see it the same way.


End file.
